About Me

Sunday, October 4, 2015

All about the girl

What is it about flawed, damaged
heroines that so fascinates us?

From the moment I encountered Lisbeth
Salander in The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo, the first book of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium
Trilogy, I fell hopelessly in love. Her punk-rock chic; her take-no-prisoners
attitude; her complete refusal to let life keep her down; and, of course, her
dragon tattoo: all of it added up to a fictional heroine like no other.

Target of an abusive father, child victim
of a cruel social services system, rape survivor, Salander refused to let these
knock-out punches cripple her. Instead, she reinvented herself as Wasp, the
mother of all hackers, took diabolical revenge on those who had hurt her, and
by the end of the third book has established herself as a reclusive millionaire
who lives in the shadows, emerging only when it suits her.

For me, the appeal of Salander lay in the
fact that she was the Ultimate Survivor. So I guess it was, in some way, inevitable
that she should survive the death of Larsson and reappear in our lives (and our
bookshelves) in The Girl In The Spider’s Web, the new book in the series,
written by David Lagercrantz.

I am always a bit leery when other
writers take over the task of telling the stories of characters that were
invented by someone else. So it was with a certain amount of trepidation when I
first started reading Lagercrantz. Could he possibly do justice to Stieg Larsson?
Would his Salander have the same resonance?

Well, I am halfway through Spider’s Web
and I am happy to report that Lagercrantz succeeds on both counts. Salander
remains the same feisty if flawed character who captured our imagination when
she first burst on to the literary scene. She has the same fierce intelligence,
the same thirst for revenge, the same scary talent, and yes, the same demons
that possessed her since she was a child. For all the damage – both physical
and psychological – inflicted on her, she remains undaunted, picking herself
off the floor time and again, and pressing on.

But as I read about her latest adventure,
I began to wonder: what is it about damaged women in fiction that fascinates us
so? Not the soppy heroines, who are always mooning over the hero. Not the good
girls who never put a foot wrong. Not the fairy princesses who get their
happily ever after. They are not the ones who resonate with us; on the
contrary, they tend to fade from memory the moment you turn the page. It is the
women with failings and flaws, the women with all the frailty and strength that
characterizes the human condition, who never release their hold on our
imagination.

A quick check with my friends threw up
several names on this list. Patricia Cornwall’s Kay Scarpetta, who cut up dead
bodies for a living; Catwoman, who is part jewel thief and part superheroine;
Lady Macbeth, whose overweening ambition powers the play; Angelina Jolie’s
Maleficent, who metamorphoses from a beautiful young woman to a terrible
creature bent on revenge; Annalise Keating, the scary super-lawyer who knows
all about How To Get Away With Murder.

All good choices. But my top five list
looks a little different, presented here in chronological order:

·Becky Sharp: The name says it all; this is a woman who has
a sharp eye out for the main chance. In an age when a woman was judged by birth
and money, Becky had neither. What she did have was beauty, wit, charm and
drive. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s world, she was the anti-heroine, the
fair symbol of vanity. In today’s world, she would have been running a
multinational corporation.

·Anna Karenina: The dissatisfied, bored wife is a fairly
routine trope of fiction. But Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina rises above the banal
with her passionate, if doomed, love for Count Vronsky. There is something
infuriating about her at times, and there are occasions when you want to reach
into the pages and give her a good shaking. But that’s only because you have
become so invested in her story.

Carrie Mathison: She’s a CIA analyst, she’s bipolar, she’s
in love with the man she hunting down, she’s a mother with zero maternal
feelings, she’s the only woman who can save the Homeland. Impossibly improbable
scenario? Yes. But Clare Danes makes it work.

·Amy Dunne: By the time you realize that she’s a full-on psycho,
you have already succumbed to the charm of Amy. You stare in horrified
fascination as she does the most unspeakable of things. And there’s a just tiny
part of you that admires her for getting away with it.

·Claire Underwood: As the ice-queen wife to the cold
conniving Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Claire’s control on her emotions
is as tight as the fitted dresses she wears. Played by Robin Wright in the
American series, she is the Lady Macbeth of our times, all ruthless ambition
and an eye to the main chance, but with just a soupcon of vulnerability that
makes her a real character rather than a prototype.